Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Q&A: John Yemma on managing the Christian Science Monitor’s leap from print to digital
- Here’s the most viewed New York Times content of 2013
- This Week in Review: Net neutrality on life support, and Google and Facebook nab startups
| Q&A: John Yemma on managing the Christian Science Monitor’s leap from print to digital Posted: 17 Jan 2014 09:19 AM PST
This month, Yemma steps down after five years as editor. Before his editorship, he also spent 20 years working for news organizations including The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, and United Press International. “I think the Monitor is in amazingly good hands and we’re on a pretty good glide-path too. It seemed like a good time to step down,” Yemma told me. I recently spoke with Yemma about the early days of the print-to-digital transition of the Monitor, the role of quizzes and games in serious journalism, and how the Monitor has diversified its revenue stream and decreased its subsidy from the church. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. Justin Ellis: The Monitor was one of the first American newspapers to shift away from daily print. When you moved from the rhythms of a print production cycle to something web-centric, what was the biggest challenge? John Yemma: It was the speed. Everything really moves faster. We were doing five-days a week in print. We had a website — it was a pretty good website, but it wasn’t a robust website. So when you put the website first and then go through the process of learning SEO and all the best practices for web-first journalism — and there’s some cultural growing pains in this — you learn how to do things faster. We were known for moderately longform journalism — I’d say the 1,000- to 1,500-word analytical article about some international news. The articles shortened, but the trick was to figure out how to make the same value in 500–700 words, or even shorter sometimes. Or multiple posts during the day of 200 or 300 words that accumulated and ended up telling the story. I’d say the biggest shift was the acculturation in the newsroom. We didn’t go into it with a full idea of what the best practices were. This was 2008 — there were of course many web-oriented journalistic operations, from Slate to Huffington Post, but we had to adapt it to our values and our culture, and that was this humane, thoughtful, analytical, globally-oriented coverage. Ellis: Where do you start a process like that? Yemma: Where you start is you take an inventory of what your capabilities are, what your talent is — you really have to look at the staff. We don’t have a big staff. I think when I came in we had 90 people on the journalism side, and now I think we are at 79 or 78. Part of that staff reduction is because we went from five-days a week in print to one-day a week in print. We didn’t need quite as many production people on the paper side. Basically, understand your talent pool and understand that you’re gonna have to do some sorting of that over time. There’s gonna be new hires, those hires are probably going to be younger people, and if they’re younger they’re probably a little more web-oriented. That mix changes over time. We didn’t try to force that mix. We didn’t say goodbye to a lot of older people and just hire younger people. Trending stories, for us, they act as the top of a very wide funnel that attracts people to our journalism through aggregators and social media and other places. Then the trick is to build in enticements and referrals so that they get interested in our longer-form journalism. So those journalists that are good at the longer-form journalism, that’s their opportunity to develop. There are intermediate steps. There are multipliers along the way, like quizzes and lists, and so forth. And we do those. But if you take a look at our site, you see that our quizzes and lists aren’t the “20 things your cat did this summer,” it’s the “5 things you need to know about the Affordable Care Act,” or “How much do you know about the Middle East?” That’s the intermediate step. The top of the funnel, the wide part, is trending news, the intermediate step is those multipliers. What we’re trying to do is bring people into a deeper relationship with our in-depth stories. Those are the ones we would typically do for the weekly magazine, which we’ll post online after the due date of the magazine. That’s the kind of piece, if we can get people to really read it — those cover stories, the deeper pieces, researched out of Baghdad or Afghanistan — those are the ones that are really our signature pieces we’re trying to bring people into a relationship with. Ellis: As a newspaper veteran, what was your first reaction to doing things like lists and quizzes? Yemma: Even if you end up as a journalist doing big important stories over time, you start to know you have to have all of it. Whether you’re at the Globe or The Dallas Morning News, you have to have a robust sports operation, because that’s something that draws people in — and maybe they’ll read the story from city hall because of that. So I think it’s just a matter of the type of list or the type of multiplier you’re doing. If you can teach with it, if you can help educate people about parts of the world that it would be good for them to know about, or policies, or social issues they need to know about, I think that’s a form of journalism. It’s just a different form of storytelling. It’s a more interactive form, and just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it’s not useful. I don’t think I was averse to that. I went through the same evolution that everyone did in the middle of the ’90s on as the Internet came in: staring in awe at Netscape and wondering how this works; going through the whole process of thinking the Internet was interesting but not necessarily seriousg and finding out it’s this huge disruptor that was going to change our industry completely. Ellis: Break down for me the revenue mix for the Monitor. Yemma: We have subscriptions to our weekly news magazine — we have about 50,000 subscribers. We have a paid newsletter called The Daily News Briefing, and it’s delivered by email every day. About 10,000 people read it; 2,500 are pure-play subscribers, and another 10,000 read it as part of a bundled package. The people who read it with a bundled package tend to be people who are subscribing to other Christian Science publications, all of which are bundled in one package. We get a cross-charge on that. It’s another form of revenue for us. We get revenue from advertising in print. We get revenue from advertising on the web. We have syndication. We still have some traditional syndication, which is other newspapers taking our news service. That’s been re-sorted over the last few years and a lot of our syndication growth is in B2B sales to databases like EBSCO and ProQuest. We pioneered the development of a ProQuest daily summary drawn from our website. They’re the ones who sell microfiches to libraries all over the country, of newspapers. So if you were doing archival research, or academic research, you would access the newspapers that way. It seems like an old-fashioned business, but not all newspaper content from more than 20 years ago is digitized. When we announced we were going web-first, we worked with ProQuest to develop a replica edition of our website every day, which we generate as an XML feed that goes to ProQuest. That was turned into a microfiche. Then we’re developing these new products, like Frontiers Market Monitor and World Business Monitor, which are using our database of international correspondents that we’re working with all the time for our mainstream publications, to do more specialized reporting for business and NGOs and other audiences that really care about international news in a more granular way. And we do get a subsidy from the Christian Science church. It depends on how you calculate it — I guess you could say it’s about $2.5 million of direct subsidy, and about $5 million that comes from an endowment fund, not unlike an endowment fund a university would have, that throws off that much per year. Ellis: Where did the drive behind the B2B stuff come from? Yemma: It was looking around at the resources we had. Our head of syndication is a guy named Norm Williams, who worked for EBSCO at one time. He had some sense of what the appetite might be on the business end. He’s working with a guy named Matt Clark, who had been on our international news desk as deputy international news editor, and went back and got an MBA at Babson. The two of them together have really been in charge of developing those products. It takes a lot of knowledge of your audience. You have to understand where the audience is, and you have to think about how you’re going to deliver to them. These are just pure feeds. They aren’t print magazines or print newsletters or anything like that. You can either subscribe to them directly, or a company might buy a certain number. It’s not unlike what Bloomberg does, where 500 people at IBM, maybe you buy 60 [terminals], and they get the feed every day. But these are very new. It took us a year-and-a-half to develop them and get everything lined up. We went live with content in the late summer, early fall of this year. So we’re just out on the market with them. It’ll probably take several years before they gain a lot of traction. Ellis: The Monitor has had success in attracting audiences through search and you’ve grown traffic over the years. How is the Monitor trying to figure out ways to get at audiences through social media? Yemma: Social is growing, but it’s growing slowly. We have a Facebook feed, and we encourage our reporters and editors to tweet and post things on Facebook. I think that social media everywhere is becoming more significant, but it’s doing it very slowly. It’s important to be out there. But you have to be really genuine about how you show people social media content. You can’t just throw things up there or spam people. Even if it’s good content, it’s got to be relevant to their lives somehow. It’s a much less direct way. The old model is one-to-many publishing. We’ve learned how to segment the markets now so that we understand what the demographic of our key reader is, and we’re trying to look at them and serve them more. We’re slicing that up into these finer slices, feeds to B2B areas, and even in sponsor plays that we have. Ellis: You guys still have a relatively robust foreign reporting corps. How have you been able to maintain that? What’s the appetite like for foreign coverage? Yemma: We have a mix of fully-paid staff correspondents in foreign bureaus, contractors in foreign bureaus, and then people that we turn to regularly. I think the change over the past few years has been that we have reduced the number of full-fledged bureaus. But there are certain places in the world where you’ve gotta have a full-fledged bureau. China, for instance. You can’t really operate there using a contractor or freelancer. You have to really have a person fully paid up, all the expenses, the translators, all of that. Same in a war zone. Happily, that’s decreasing now, but during the height of the Iraq war we had fully-paid correspondents there. We have a correspondent in the Middle East and Jerusalem. We think it’s good to have our person there right now. In other places, Moscow, we have a great correspondent. For all intents and purposes, he’s on staff, but he’s on contract. Several places in Africa we’ve done that too. You’re always changing what your emphasis is. In the mid-part of the last decade, definitely. We were in Iraq and we were going to stay in Iraq. But everybody has shifted now because the news cycle has changed. We’re committed to international news. We’re trying to keep the expenses down — it’s very expensive. The New York Times is able to do these fully-funded bureaus everywhere, and that’s great. But even they have contractors and stringers. We just have a different proportion of those. We’re a smaller operation. These are things an editor always says, but it’s no less true because of it: It’s a global economy. And things like the war on terror and environmental issues, these are all global issues that affect us. The pollution coming out of northern China, or Fukushima, is not insignificant to American readers. But you don’t just want to be American-centric. You want to try to understand those issues because they’re of concern to local people too. Ellis: The Monitor is going through a redesign, and one of the things I noticed is you want to give readers options to take action based on stories. Why shift the relationship between a news organization and readers that way? Yemma: We think that readers, our readers in particular, are oriented toward taking action already. But not all of them see a direct line between news stories they’re reading and the possibility of action they could take. We’re already working with vendors like Shoutabout, and we have modules at the bottom of certain pages, saying Do you want to write your congressman, or Would you like to contribute, or whatever. We also are doing a little bit more interactive content with our readers, in a section we call DC Decoder, where we ask readers if they’re interested in telling us what kind of story we should do now. I think we just feel as though we need to get closer to our audience. I think everybody does. I think in the first generation of web-first journalism, we, like everybody else, experimented with comments after articles. And we found that just to be not very useful or enlightening type of process. Our default setting is comments are off. We can turn them on, and we do allow people to turn them on when they want. But it just feels as though that’s not a productive form of interactivity. So we’re trying to develop other forms of interactivity where we have a little bit higher level of engagement with readers. We think that taking action, or inviting them to tell us what stories we should pursue, those are vehicles that might deepen engagement. That’s why we’re moving in that direction. Ellis: Why step down now? What made this the time for you to step back? Yemma: I write a column for the weekly and I write a column for our daily news briefing. I really enjoy writing, and I’m gonna continue writing. I’ve done this for five-and-a-half years, I’ve really enjoyed it. I really respect Marshall Ingwerson, who’s our managing editor, who’s gonna step up to be editor. I think it’s just time for me to pass the torch. I would like to deepen the writing I’m doing, both for the Monitor and other places. There’s some practical considerations too: I wouldn’t mind ending my commute. I wouldn’t say I’m retiring, per se, but I’m trying to shift to do more creative work. And I think the Monitor is in amazingly good hands and we’re on a pretty good glide-path too. It seemed like a good time to step down. Photo of Christian Science Monitor newspaper box in 2009 by AP/Lisa Poole. |
| Here’s the most viewed New York Times content of 2013 Posted: 17 Jan 2014 08:10 AM PST The New York Times has published an analysis of their most viewed digital content from 2013. The data is broken down into categories across media, including videos, interactives and articles/blogs, as well as by platform, including mobile web, iPad and iPhone apps.
Interestingly, while breaking news, especially about the Boston Marathon bombings, dominated on mobile and iPhone, the most popular iPad content was a highly visual travel story. |
| This Week in Review: Net neutrality on life support, and Google and Facebook nab startups Posted: 17 Jan 2014 06:00 AM PST The end of net neutrality?: Net neutrality was dealt its most severe blow in recent history this week as a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn’t have jurisdiction to regulate Internet service providers in the same way that it does phone companies. This means Verizon — the company that brought the suit against the FCC — and other ISPs will be free to form deals with online companies to let some of them allow customers to access their sites more quickly for a fee. There were a ton of angles to explore and opinions to hear out on the ruling, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram collected many of them in a very thorough roundup. Several good posts explained the basics of the issue: The New York Times has a good primer on net neutrality and the FCC’s role, and The Wall Street Journal explained some of the key passages of the decision. A team of web freedom experts also answered other questions on what just happened and what happens next at Reddit. The ruling struck down the conflicted legal framework under which the FCC attempted to regulate Internet providers — essentially, the Bush-era FCC classified ISPs as more loosely regulated “information services,” rather than the more strictly regulated phone companies, while the Obama-era FCC tried to apply the same regulation powers to those information services as the telecom companies get. The court said the FCC can’t do that, so this ruling put the ball back in the FCC’s court: They can appeal to the Supreme Court, try to reclassify ISPs as telecom services, or give up on net neutrality and try some other workarounds to enforce open access. Nilay Patel of The Verge detailed how the FCC ended up in this spot. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung explained how reclassification might work, and The Wrap’s Ira Teinowitz noted that Congressional Republicans have already warned against that path, while consumer groups have endorsed it. Former Wired reporter Ryan Singel also offered a useful account of how the FCC got here, and said the FCC won’t pick a reclassification fight with Republicans and the ISP industry. Instead, he said, the best hope for an open web is building open-access municipal fiber networks. With or without a protracted reclassification fight, we’re going to see preferential-access deals between ISPs and online companies soon, though the providers insisted the ruling won’t ultimately hurt customers. That’s doubtful, of course, but the bigger damage may be on the producers’ side, where the ruling allows Internet giants to pay more for better user access, crowding out startups and innovation. John Herrman of BuzzFeed has the best explanation of how the threat of a non-neutral web has evolved, noting that, on the surface, the changes might appear positive for customers, as Internet companies pay ISPs to subsidize your data use. Others, including Tim Wu at The New Yorker, Dan Gillmor at The Guardian, John Judis at The New Republic, and Cale Guthrie Weissman at PandoDaily, made a similar argument about how the ruling will privilege tech monopolies. “The promise, and for several decades the reality, of the internet was decentralization: a network of networks where innovation would take place largely at the edges, not in the center,” wrote Gillmor. “We are on the verge of losing the internet that held such promise, at least for the near and medium term.” Venture capitalist Fred Wilson illustrated how frustrating the scenario would be for entrepreneurs, and Forbes’ Tom Watson expressed concern for the future of nonprofits and social entrepreneurship. Free Press’ Josh Stearns made the case that the end of net neutrality would be a blow to online journalism as well.
Google’s big buy, and Facebook’s small one: Two web giants made noteworthy purchases this week: The much larger purchase was Google’s acquisition of Nest, a company that makes smart thermostats and smoke alarms, for $3.2 billion. Though the price appeared to be something of an overpay, Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett and The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy have the best explanations of what Nest brings to Google: Nest gives Google a real entrée into people’s homes, something that, as Barrett noted, Google has struggled with in the past. It also ties into Google’s move into smart devices, something it’s invested a lot in with its work on self-driving cars. “In whatever form, understanding the connected device, and how people work with it, is a big part of understanding overall behavior, and that is Google's driving ambition,” Hardy wrote. On Nest’s end, Hardy pointed out that the company is run by Apple veterans who were already considerably wealthy, so the acquisition isn’t necessarily just about cashing out. Nest’s CEO, Tony Fadell, told Recode and The Verge that his company needed infrastructure more than anything to grow, and Google provides plenty of that. Of course, Google’s move into smart devices built around daily behavior within the home has people understandably nervous about privacy. Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham and Salon’s Andrew Leonard both articulated those worries, and while Nest said its customer data will only be used for Nest products, John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out that its policy can change, wondering, “Does anyone seriously think Google doesn't want the information Nest's devices provide?” The second purchase was smaller, but had more potential implications for social news: Facebook bought Branch and its sister service Potluck, both of which center on structured conversations around news links, for $15 million. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said Branch could help Facebook figure out how to create spaces for smart discussions, an issue with which Facebook continues to have difficulty, though The Daily Dot’s Kate Knibbs was more skeptical about the usefulness of Branch and the wisdom of the purchase. The Lab’s Joshua Benton suggested that this purchase has the distinct smell of an “acquihire,” an acquisition done more for a startup’s employees than for its product. SiliconBeat’s Brandon Bailey also reported that the acquisition was indeed an acquihire, and that Facebook is not actually getting the rights to Branch’s technology. (What this means for the product itself is unclear.) Bailey and others noted that Branch’s Josh Miller has been a critic of Facebook in the past, and PandoDaily’s Michael Carney questioned the fit, given Branch’s roots in Obvious, an incubator co-founded by Twitter’s founders.
Social media and the power to tell personal stories: Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, Emma, triggered a debate about publicness, publishing authority, and social media (along with a whole lot of criticism) when they both wrote columns about Lisa Bonchek Adams, who has been blogging and tweeting about her increasingly painful experience with breast cancer for several years. Emma Keller’s column in The Guardian, published last week, wondered if Adams was sharing too much, asking her tweets were “a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies.” Bill Keller’s column in the Times this week was a bit less severe but questioned whether Adams’ documentation was glorifying a method of dealing with cancer that isn’t for every patient. Shortly after Bill’s column ran, The Guardian deleted Emma’s column, explaining its rationale a couple of days later. The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, issued a mild rebuke of Bill’s column, saying it struck a wrong note on tone and sensitivity and appeared to some as a double-barreled attack with his wife on Adams. The rebuke from others was much stronger. BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, who herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, catalogued Bill Keller’s faults in both tone and fact on Twitter. Likewise, Gawker’s Adam Weinstein, Wired’s Maryn McKenna, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram all issued scathing critiques of the Keller’s condescension. There were several smart pieces that attempt to pinpoint exactly what the Kellers weren’t understanding about social media and self-disclosure, including one by sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who wrote that the Kellers got Adams’ case so wrong because they merely perused her postings: “Social media is not a snapshot that can be understood in one moment, or through back-scrolling. It's a lively conversation, a community, an interaction with implicit and explicit conversations and channels of signaling, communication and impression.” The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said the Kellers misidentified one Twitter user’s style of writing as some sort of “this is the way we treat death now” trend, when Twitter is anything but a monolith. The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins said the Kellers ultimately objected to someone else without their professional or cultural cachet being able to tell their story, and NPR’s Linda Holmes made a similar point, arguing that traditional media assumes some sort of presumption of importance is necessary to public writing on personal subjects, while that presumption isn’t present in the social media environment in which Adams writes. Adams’ writing on Twitter is “not meant to announce its own heft as appearing on an op-ed page does,” Holmes wrote. “She didn’t ask for endorsement, she didn’t ask for sign-off, she didn’t ask for agreement. She’s just telling a story.” Reading roundup: A few other stories to take note of this week: — After years of hemorrhaging money and months of trying to find a buyer, AOL unloaded its hyperlocal news network Patch on Hale Global, “an investment company that specializes in turning around troubled companies through technological innovation,” as The New York Times put it. As Recode noted, AOL will maintain a small stake in Patch, but Hale will take over its operation and AOL is done funding Patch’s losses. Hale and AOL are both saying Patch’s 900 sites will remain open. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram noted the clear lesson here: Hyperlocal doesn’t scale. — The Knight News Challenge announced the winners of its most recent round of grants, which focused on health and data. A total of $2.2 million went to seven projects, and the Lab and American Press Institute highlighted one of them, the Solutions Journalism Network. — NBC News announced it’s partnering with and investing in NowThis News, a social video news startup funded by BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer. New York magazine, meanwhile, published a feature on Lerer and his son, Ben, and their growing role as tech company funders. — New York Times reporter James Risen appealed his long legal case to protect a confidential source to the Supreme Court this week, setting up a potentially definitive fight over whether journalists have the right not to name their confidential sources in response to court orders. Vocativ also talked to Risen about the case. — Finally, two other interesting pieces, one an interview with the AP’s Eric Carvin on the state of social media and journalism, and the other a Columbia Journalism Review piece on research into the quality of the New Orleans Times-Picayune after its digital overhaul. Image of Ethernet cable by Bert Boerland used under a Creative Commons license. |
John Yemma arrived as editor of The Christian Science Monitor in 2008, at one of the lowest moments of the modern newspaper industry. Within a few months, the century-old newspaper had decided radical change was needed: 
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